Monday, December 04, 2006

Benny's just bought God a new Gulfstream jet, and he wants his flock of dupes to pay for it. Ay-mayzing. Check the transparently manipulative language in the sales pitch here and boggle that anyone's brain could be so calcified as to buy it.

...Now we must pay the remainder of the down payment, and I am asking the Lord Jesus to speak to 6,000 of my precious partners to sow a seed of $1,000 in the next ninety days. And I am praying, even as I write this letter, that you will be one of them!

I know that as you obey the Lord, He will open heaven wide and cause a mighty harvest of blessings to descend upon your life and all that you do!

Take special note of the phrasing, "I know that as you obey the Lord..." This bit of smarm is very much in keeping with the language of something called NLP, or neuro-linguistic programming, which is all about how to phrase sales pitches to rubes using careful turns of phrase that make them think they're doing something other than what you're really trying to get them to do (buy your product, have sex with you), and that the decision to do it is their idea, that they arrived at all on their own because it was really the only sensible thing to do, and why would they even consider not doing it? He wants his "precious" partners — the ones who are already forking over loads of cash they can probably barely spare in the first place, so that Benny can live it up in places like this — to "sow a seed" of six million dollars for his fancy jet, and he's equating doing this with "obeying the Lord". Confronted with meretriciousness and hubris of this degree, I don't know whether to tip my hat in grudging respect, or buy an ad banner on the Al Jazeera website seeking shoe bombers.

This guy needs a new longer-range G4 because his older G3 couldn't get him to Africa as well. He's not just scamming money from people in the wealthy US, he's getting it by the planeload in Africa, where the average donor can't afford the basics.

Curt: Yeah, it's awe-inspiring that Benny still gets play in Africa, after the debacle at his May 2000 Nairobi "crusade", where he claimed — to the slack-jawed amazement of Christianity's less insane contingency worldwide — that Jesus was going to manifest physically. Such an event would, of course, constitute the Second Coming Itself; only Benny would have the stones to claim with such confidence that the Messiah was scheduling that penultimate event (for which the entire Church has only been waiting two millennia) to occur at one of Pastor Benny's "crusades".

The Nairobi "crusade" was also the one where four genuinely sick people had the bad taste to die while waiting to go up on stage (and, one must assume, being refused) for their "miracle".

Benny should be in prison. He's so irredeemably repugnant in every way that, sometimes, I wish God did exist, so that after Benny dies, he gets to have a real pants-shitting moment when God looks him in the eye and calmly explains why Benny doesn't get the Royal Suite this time. ("So...you said I was speaking to you onstage...Funny...I don't recall that...") Kind of like the final scene in The Godfather. ("Don't tell me you didn't know anything, because it insults my intelligence.")

PLEASE NOTE: The Atheist Experience has moved to a new location, and this blog is now closed to comments. To participate in future discussions, please visit http://www.freethoughtblogs.com/axp.

This blog encourages believers who disagree with us to comment. However, anonymous comments are disallowed to weed out cowardly flamers who hide behind anonymity. Commenters will only be banned when they've demonstrated they're nothing more than trolls whose behavior is intentionally offensive to the blog's readership.

Email policy

All emails sent to the program at the tv[at]atheist-community[dot]org address become the property of the ACA, and the desire for a reply is assumed. Note that this reply could take the form of a public response on the show or here on the blog. In those cases, we will never include the correspondent's address, but will include names unless we deem it inappropriate. If you absolutely do not wish for us to address your email publicly, please include a note to that effect (like "private response only" or "not for publication" or "if you post this on the blog please don't use my name") somewhere in the letter.

Google Analytics script

Subscribe To

AE and Related Sites

PLEASE NOTE: The Atheist Experience has moved to a new location, and this blog is now closed to comments. To participate in future discussions, please visit http://www.freethoughtblogs.com/axp.The Atheist Experience is a weekly live call-in television show sponsored by the Atheist Community of Austin. This independently-run blog (not sponsored by the ACA) features contributions from current and former hosts and co-hosts of the show.